Award-winning author Mary Helen Specht will give a reading and discuss her debut novel, Migratory Animals, Monday 20 April at 4 p.m. in the Mood-Bridwell Atrium. 

Centering on a protagonist who finds herself torn between love and duty, Migratory Animals concerns a group of 30-somethings struggling for connection and belonging. When Flannery, a young scientist, is forced to return to Austin after five years of research in Nigeria, she is pulled between her two homes. Having left behind her loving fiancé without knowing when she can return, Flan learns that her sister, Molly, has begun to show signs of the crippling genetic disease that slowly killed their mother.

Born and raised in Abilene, Texas, Mary Helen Specht has a B.A. in English from Rice University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College, where she won the department’s fiction award. Her writing has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes and has appeared in numerous publications, including: The New York Times; The Colorado Review; Prairie Schooner; Michigan Quarterly Review; The Southwest Review; Florida Review; Southwestern American Literature; World Literature Today; Blue Mesa; Hunger Mountain; Bookslut; The Texas Observer; and Night Train, where she won the Richard Yates Short Story Award. A past Fulbright Scholar to Nigeria and Dobie-Paisano Writing Fellow, Specht teaches at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas.

Specht’s talk is made possible by the Southwestern University Writer-in-Residence Fund.